Raphael Stevens

The bankruptcy-run sale for Bed Bath & Beyond was delayed once again as the company continues discussions with potential bidders for its assets, namely Buy Buy Baby.
Buy Buy Baby has generated interest from potential buyers, while Bed Bath & Beyond is expected to be dissolved after its bankruptcy.
The sale timeline has already been delayed as discussions progress.

“Everything on Sale” signs at a Buy Buy Baby store in the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Monday, Feb. 6, 2023.
Stephanie Keith | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The auction process for Bed Bath & Beyond and its assets was extended once again as discussions progress with potential bidders, namely for its Buy Buy Baby chain of stores.
In court papers filed Thursday, Bed Bath & Beyond said it would delay its sale timeline by a few days “to ensure the most value maximizing transaction is achieved.”

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The delay comes as the company has held discussions with potential bidders for Buy Buy Baby, which has attracted the most interest before and during the bankruptcy process so far. The chain of namesake Bed Bath & Beyond stores is still expected to be dissolved after the bankruptcy.
The assets of the baby gear retailer Buy Buy Baby had earlier attracted interest from at least two bidders, including Babylist, CNBC previously reported. The interest particularly centers on the chain’s intellectual property.
There have also been discussions to sell the retailer to the private-equity firm behind the children’s apparel brand Janie and Jack, The Wall Street Journal reported this week.
Buy Buy Baby has been considered the crown jewel of the assets, reportedly attracting interest in 2022 and in the months ahead of the bankruptcy filing.
While there appears to be no interest in Bed Bath & Beyond and its stores, potential bidders may want its digital assets, CNBC earlier reported.

The valuation of these assets remains unclear.
Bed Bath & Beyond sought bankruptcy protection in April after months of failed turnaround efforts and warnings it could find itself in court.
Stalking horse bids — the floor bid for an auction — are now due June 11 at 5 p.m. ET. The final bid deadline is now June 16 at 12 p.m. ET. If needed, an auction will take place on June 21.
The company said in court papers it believes “these limited extensions are appropriate and necessary to keep these cases progressing efficiently, while not precluding adequate evaluation of new indications of interest.” More

J. Crew is launching a virtual beach house in celebration of its 40th anniversary with experiential e-commerce platform Obsess.
Virtual storefronts are on the rise, and Obsess has built platforms for a slew of other retailers and brands, including American Girl, Ralph Lauren, Corona, Crocs, Coach, Dior and Mattel.
The interface, which often includes games and scavenger hunts, leads to better conversions and boosts engagement, according to Obsess.

J. Crew virtual beach house.
Courtesy: J. Crew

In a brown shingled beach house tucked behind stalks of reed grass, J. Crew customers encounter a new shopping experience. 
Just beyond a set of wood steps and a wraparound porch, shoppers can explore a series of white-paneled rooms, a boathouse and a secret lighthouse that highlight the brand’s history and some of its most popular apparel. 

Inside the rooms, shoppers can browse barn jackets, rollneck sweaters and rugby shirts. Outside on the porch, bathing suits are displayed on a clothesline.
While customers can select and purchase items as they would in any J. Crew store, the beach house comes with one key difference: It’s entirely virtual. 
To mark J. Crew’s 40th anniversary, the brand is launching its first immersive shopping experience Friday with e-commerce platform Obsess, which creates 3D, virtual stores for retailers that customers can access from their phones or laptops. 
Derek Yarbrough, the chief marketing officer of J. Crew and Madewell, told CNBC the company is planning a series of events to celebrate the brand’s anniversary. But they tend to be in places such as New York and Los Angeles, which limits the number of people who can attend, he said.
“With Obsess, we were really looking to have an exciting activation that we could execute for a larger audience and reach more of the people who love the brand in a bigger way,” Yarbrough said in an interview. “We really wanted this to be a passport to explore the world of J. Crew … and as the team brainstormed on it, it was a little bit of a no-brainer to take the form of a beach house.” 

J. Crew virtual beach house.
Courtesy: J. Crew

Obsess was launched in 2017 by its CEO, Neha Singh, a former Google software engineer. It aims to transform traditional online shopping into something more immersive, so shoppers remain engaged rather than lose interest as they endlessly scroll for their next purchase. 
In Obsess’ virtual storefronts, customers can create their own avatars. Depending on the retailer, they can also play games that can unlock more content, promotions or other bonuses that keep them in the virtual stores for longer, the company said. 
“What our platform does is it enables brands to create that much richer and more immersive digital experience that borrows the interface from gaming,” said Singh. “Today, the experience is so generic. Other than font and color, there’s really no differentiation between brands’ digital presence, but their physical retail presence is so different. So how can we bring some of those elements into online?”

Virtual storefronts on the rise

Many retailers saw the metaverse, a virtual world that offered another possible platform to sell products, as the hot new technology throughout last year. Many of those same companies have now largely forgotten it, as strides in artificial intelligence have surged to the top of business leaders’ minds a year later.
While the metaverse may be dead — for now — virtual storefronts are growing. Obsess is now powering more than 200 virtual stores that tens of millions of shoppers have visited and bought products in. 
The company’s clients include American Girl, Elizabeth Arden, Dior, Ralph Lauren, Corona, Laneige, Crocs, Coach, Mattel, Maybelline, Johnson & Johnson and even NBCUniversal, among others. 
The virtual storefronts allow retailers to bring a version of the metaverse to their customers, without the need for pricey headgear or other steep barriers to entry.

J. Crew virtual beach house.
Courtesy: J. Crew

“Technology never stops, and it’s going to keep progressing, but it has to be something that’s user-friendly, right? And parts of [the metaverse] are not user-friendly yet,” said Singh. “We launched the company before metaverse was a buzzy topic, and it really was just about: How can we use the latest technology to actually create a better customer experience?” 
When e-commerce was born in the 1990s, Amazon led the way in its online bookstore, which featured a white background and icons of books with text describing them.
Since then, little has changed when it comes to the basic interface of online shopping.
“If you think about e-commerce, the typical sort of interface today, it’s a grid of thumbnails on a white background; whether you’re shopping for fashion, or beauty or home, it’s really all the same,” Singh said. “The interface looks like a database that really hasn’t changed in 25 years [since] it was first created.” 

Gamifying shopping, boosting engagement 

Shoppers headed to J. Crew’s virtual store can access a series of interactive games, including a scavenger hunt and a quiz on catalog covers, where customers will be asked to guess what year they were published. 
Once they go through all the rooms and complete the quests, shoppers gain access to the secret lighthouse.

J. Crew virtual beach house.
Courtesy: J. Crew

“We see actually a 10-times-higher add-to-cart rate if people engage and complete the game. So typically now in all of our virtual stores there’s some element of gamification, and it’s very kind of naturally embedded into the flow of the store,” said Singh. 
“The more interesting you can make the experience and keep people engaged and give them content and give them games, the more they shop,” she said.
Some companies offer discounts or promotions as a “prize” for completing a game, which could contribute to boosted checkout rates. 
Obsess said one of its customers, a luxury jewelry brand, said the average order value in its virtual store was 111% higher than on its traditional e-commerce site. 
However, J. Crew’s Yarbrough said he is most excited about how long the virtual store could keep customers engaged. 

J. Crew virtual beach house.
Courtesy: J. Crew

For example, on American Girl’s virtual store, shoppers spend six to 10 minutes on average per session, which is 1,000% longer than the average time spent for all shoppers on the company’s website, Obsess said. 
One luxury fashion brand said the amount of time people spent in its virtual store was 74% higher than time spent on its traditional e-commerce site, according to Obsess. Overall, introducing avatars increases time spent by an average 73%, and when customers create an avatar, they’re on average 184% more likely to proceed to checkout, Obsess said. 
“In today’s landscape, it’s so hard to not only get but keep people’s attention — you usually get a few seconds,” Yarbrough said. “So, if I can actually get someone to engage with an experience for several minutes or even longer, oh my God, that’s such a rich opportunity to really get someone hooked.” 
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC. More

Walmart has trained pharmacists on specialty HIV treatments in communities that are highly affected by the virus, and it plans to expand the program to nearly a dozen states this year.
The HIV specialty pharmacies work with local clinics and community groups to try to engage patients on testing and gaining access to treatments.
CVS and Walgreens have launched similar programs, partnering with an initiative from the federal government that aims to reduce the HIV epidemic by 2030.

David Rosario remembers the late 1980s with mixed emotions. He had achieved his goal of becoming a professional dancer in New York City, but in that world he also lost many young male friends to AIDS. There were few treatment options available then for the disease that hit the gay community especially hard.
“It was sad at that time,” Rosario said. “There was nothing there, so these beautiful people lost their lives.”

Now, Rosario owns a restaurant in New Jersey with his husband. Every month, he picks up medication at his local Walmart pharmacy that makes HIV undetectable and untransmittable — a prospect that was unthinkable just a generation ago. But that ease of access now gives him hope.
“It’s not a big, terribly big deal for me, but for a lot of these young boys that are searching for relationships and things, I think it is a game-changer,” he said.

Walmart’s HIV outreach

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates new HIV infections have fallen 12% in recent years, from 36,500 new cases in 2017 to 32,000 in 2021. Yet racial and ethnic disparities remain pronounced, with people of color accounting for a disproportionate share of new HIV diagnoses. African Americans accounted for 40% of new cases in 2021, and Latinos accounted for 29%, according to CDC data.
Walmart launched an HIV specialty-pharmacy pilot program in late 2021, targeting just over half a dozen highly affected communities, including Rosario’s county in New Jersey.
“We can see from the data that that there’s a need here — there’s a higher incidence of HIV,” said Kevin Host, Walmart pharmacy senior vice president.

Now, the retail giant plans to expand its program to more than 80 HIV-specialty facilities across nearly a dozen states by the end of this year.

Shoppers wait in line at the pharmacy of a Walmart store in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Callaghan O’Hare | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The company’s pharmacists have undergone specialized training on HIV conditions and drugs to treat and prevent the virus. A big part of that is how to begin a conversation with patients who might be at risk.
“Getting patients to talk about their status can be a challenge,” said pharmacist Gemima Kleine. “There’s the stigma around it, and it’s better than it used to be, but it’s not gone.”

Public-private HIV partnership

That stigma may contribute to people in some communities being reluctant to seek treatment. But it’s not the only problem people who might be HIV positive face.
Last year, while just over half of non-Hispanic white patients had coverage for pre-exposure prophylaxis medications, known as PrEP, CDC data shows just 13.6% of Latino and 6.9% of African American patients were covered for the drugs, which help prevent transmission of the virus.
To help fill the gap, Walmart and two of its large pharmacy rivals, CVS Health and Walgreens, have signed on to the Department of Health and Human Services’ initiative to end the HIV epidemic by 2030 by making antiviral medications more widely available and providing support services.
“There are certain medications where maybe if you miss a dose, it’s not the worst thing, you won’t have that much of an impact, but with the HIV AIDS medications, that compliance is so important,” Kleine said.
CVS has made HIV testing available at its Minute Clinics and helped patients access prescriptions with no out-of-pocket costs through the government program known as Ready, Set, PrEP.
Similarly, Walgreens has trained more than 3,000 of its pharmacists to offer treatment advice, provide ongoing testing and facilitate free home delivery of HIV meds to help encourage patients to adhere to medication regimens.
And Walmart has seen its outreach — to local health clinics and community groups that help patients gain medical coverage in highly affected communities — begin to pay off.
“When they know that we’ve got additional training and services to help their patients, we’ll start to see them come in, and that’s when we get to engage with them,” Host said. “It’s really been a great marriage between community and business.”
On June 27, as part of National HIV Testing Day, Walmart will also join other pharmacies and offer free HIV testing across its stores.
The HIV program outreach has come as major pharmacies are focusing on expanding their health-care services. They’re hoping initiatives such as the specialty pharmacies will underscore their role as community retail health providers in consumers’ minds — and improve outcomes for patients.
“Hopefully, they will be rolling something like this out in small towns, cities — that maybe it’s harder to get things or they’re unaware,” Rosario said. More

CNN is seeking a new CEO after Chris Licht left the company following a series of missteps.
His tenure may well have been doomed from the beginning about a year ago, when he killed CNN+.
Without the fledgling streaming service, which lasted just a few weeks, he had no clear business vision for the news network.

Chris Licht, Chairman and CEO, CNN Worldwide, speaks onstage during the Warner Bros. Discovery Upfront 2023 at The Theater at Madison Square Garden on May 17, 2023 in New York City. 
Kevin Mazur | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav could have selected from a litany of reasons to fire Chris Licht as CNN’s chief.
Licht, who left the network Wednesday after just over a year in the role, struggled with leadership style, lifting morale, programming decisions, how to cover former President Donald Trump and, ultimately, hubris.

But Licht’s entire tenure at CNN could have turned out differently had he persuaded Zaslav to keep CNN+.
That may sound absurd. Hardly anyone watched CNN+ during its first two weeks of existence last year. Zaslav and several other Discovery executives, including current Warner Bros. Discovery head of streaming JB Perrette and now-CNN Chief Operating Officer David Leavy, were skeptical of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on niche or half-baked content ideas like “Jake Tapper’s Book Club” and “Parental Guidance with Anderson Cooper.” Leavy is now part of the executive team that will help Zaslav find a new CEO.
Zaslav thought CNN+ was a waste of resources for a company saddled with $50 billion of debt that needed to boost free cash flow and generate $3 billion in merger-related synergies. But before he made any decisions, he wanted to hear Licht’s thoughts.
Licht was supposed to begin his job May 2, 2022, but he started a few weeks early to weigh in on CNN+. In several virtual conferences, he met with CNN+ head Andrew Morse, CNN+ general manager Alex MacCallum and CNN Chief Tech Officer Robyn Peterson, according to people familiar with the matter who declined to be identified due to the private nature of the talks. Perrette and Discovery streaming CFO Neil Chugani (who would become CNN’s CFO) were also there.
Licht expressed his skepticism with the product’s programming, according to people in the meeting. The discussion centered around the viability of offering a product named after CNN without actually featuring a live feed of the network’s cable programming. Perrette told the CNN+ leadership to pause all marketing spending and not to launch on Roku.

While the CNN+ team came away from the meetings assuming the streaming service would likely be killed, they sent financials to Discovery’s leadership. They budgeted to spend $440 million in 2022 and $550 million in 2023, the people said. The proposal called for CNN+ to turn a profit by 2025 and break even on the cumulative investment by 2028.
Less than three weeks later, CNN+ was dead. A Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson declined to comment on the details of the meetings.

CNN+ alternate reality

Had Licht persuaded the Discovery executives to keep CNN+, it’s possible his tenure at CNN would have developed differently.
Licht’s background is show producing. He launched “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and jumpstarted “Late Night with Stephen Colbert” on CBS. CNN+ would have given him a canvas to create shows from scratch. It also would have given him a growth story to pitch to the press and investors. If additional spending wasn’t in the cards, he could have slashed the budget but kept the bones of the subscription product alive, iterating on creative ideas until he landed on something that worked. CNN+ launched at $4.99 per month, though pricing could have been adjusted.
Former CNN head Jeff Zucker, who left the network after disclosing a workplace relationship just months before the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger, had aspirations about turning CNN+ into a New York Times-like subscription product. That would have taken years, but it also might have given employees and management a north star. Attention on CNN+ could have been a ready-made distraction from falling linear TV ratings, which Licht could have dismissed as relatively unimportant compared with building the company’s future.

Jeff Zucker, left, and David Zaslav
Chris Kleponis | Bloomberg via Getty Images; CNBC

Without CNN+, Licht was left with a foundering cable TV network and no coherent digital strategy. That’s anathema to a modern media company.
In his year on the job, Licht laid off hundreds of employees and mostly shifted around existing CNN anchors and reporters to build a new morning show and prime-time programming. His experiment to move prime-time anchor Don Lemon to the morning failed. CNN fired Lemon in April. Licht attempted to move Tapper, an afternoon anchor, to prime time, but the early ratings weren’t good, and Licht scrapped his plans.

A new leader with vision

In Licht’s defense, his lack of future strategy echoed Zaslav’s limited vision.
“When [Zaslav] called and offered me the job, he told me what he was looking for out of CNN,” Licht told CNBC last year. “And I said, ‘That’s exactly the kind of network I would like to see.’ There’s no daylight between his vision for this network and my vision for this network. The only reason why I took this job is because it was him in charge. I thought, I can deliver this for him.”

Zaslav told Licht he wanted to make CNN less of an advocacy network and more of a straight news network. Warner Bros. Discovery board member John Malone told CNBC in 2021 he’d “like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing.”
But CNN journalists argued this was a straw man. They claimed they weren’t advocating for anything other than truth. Several took offense to Malone’s comments as a slight to their journalistic skills.
CNN can change the tone of its programming around Trump, who is the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. It can tone down hyperbole and rhetoric around his lies and exaggerations, depending on the situation.
Still, that’s not a business strategy. CNN+ may have been doomed to be nothing more than a fledgling streaming service. But it represented hope for how a brand could transition toward the future. A successful leader of CNN will need to figure out a way to boost ratings with compelling programming while also fostering new digital businesses that bring in revenue and younger audiences.
It’s possible CNN+ would have never taken off, and Licht would have spent the past year doubling down on a flawed concept that his Discovery bosses never liked — which probably would have led to his firing anyway. Investors thumbed their nose at increased spending on streaming services last year, so any plan around CNN+ needed to emphasize its long-term appeal.
The problem was without CNN+, Licht held a weak hand. CNN’s profit fell in 2022 to about $750 million (including $200 million in CNN+ losses) from $1.25 billion the previous year on a weak advertising market and declining cable subscription fees, according to The New York Times. Advertising revenue at CNN dropped nearly 40% under Licht, The Daily Beast reported, citing MediaRadar data.
The 2024 election and a more robust political ad market should help CNN’s financials improve next year, but “wait for 2024” isn’t a strong message — and it doesn’t provide a solution for 2025 and beyond.
If Zaslav wants to find a CEO that will win the hearts and minds of employees and boost the top and bottom lines, he’ll need to find someone with a more holistic strategy than just programming for a 55-and-older cable TV audience.
In that way, Licht was doomed from the start.
Correction: Robyn Peterson was chief tech officer of CNN. An earlier version misstated his title. Neil Chugani was CFO of Discovery streaming. An earlier version misspelled his name.
WATCH: Chris Licht’s tumultuous tenure More